A/N: I'm not updating as regularly as I was; I know this, and I am trying to rectify it. College though...it's stressful. All outstanding requests to be completed soon!

For Round 3 of the November Fanfiction Tournament, requiring a fic about a third year.

Pairing: Albus Potter/Scorpius Malfoy

Prompt: 25. Beginning.

Your parents' annual Christmas party. Everyone is here, and you've always hated crowds, haven't you?

The door barely makes a sound as it closes behind you.

It's so very cold outside. You can feel yourself shivering. That icy scent of winter is in the air, frost and firewood, and you throw your eyes up to the sky. The stars are so bright in that deep blue sky.

There is a sudden noise behind you, and you jump, startled, but it is just another boy.

He walks as quick and stiff as a toy soldier would, cigarette dangling between his fingertips and smoke darting out from between his narrow lips, and you are staring, Mr. Potter.

He laughs somewhere deep in his throat and you feel it somewhere deep in your stomach and he says, "So. You're Albus."

Your name rolls off his tongue in a way you've never heard before, so foreign and so familiar and right. A part of you wants to ask him what the hell he's doing with a cigarette, doesn't he know that will kill him, he's only thirteen, for Merlin's sake, but the rest of you...the rest of you wonders how his name would taste, whether or not it would burn your throat or leave a trail of ash across your tongue, and you want to say it out loud but you can't.

"I'm Scorpius." he says, as if you didn't know, as if you haven't been watching him for years now.

"I know."

His eyes pierce you like hot metal pokers, their colour just as bright, just as shining silver. His gaze is heavy on your lips. You blush.

"Where've you been hiding?" he says, his words caught in a smoky embrace and dancing into the air like tumbling waves. He taps the end of his cigarette and you watch the ash quiver, flutter, fall to the floor.

"Nowhere."

"Liar," he mutters in between quick drags of the deathstick clutched between his teeth. His cheeks hollow, caving in like the ceiling of an old church, and his cheekbones are sharp as those shattered stained glass windows.

"You just haven't been looking hard enough," you say quietly, and he's looking at you again.

"Fair enough," he says. "Consider my eyes open from now on."

The sweeping gaze he grazes along the bumps of your body makes your breath stutter, makes you wish you had a Beater's body, but you don't. You are skinny little Al Potter and maybe it's not all bad, because the way his lip curls up and his eyes light up makes you think he likes that.

Makes you think he likes you.

With a flick, he throws the cigarette butt to the ground. It catches in the wind and dances through the air like a gymnast, before it gets caught between the vines of an overgrown bush. The flame still flickers orange at the end.

"See you around then, Potter." His smirk is undeniable, the teasing in his voice inconceivable, and you want to feel those words pressed against your skin.

He walks away, toy soldier once more, straight backed and proud and, dear Merlin, you should not feel like this.

(But, Albus dear, this is only the beginning.

This party is nowhere near over.)

You spend the rest of the night blushing in the dark and trying not to imagine a tangle of limbs and teeth and blond and black and so much skin.

And, suddenly, it's not that cold out here at all.